Analyzing Categories: Harvey Sacks and Critical Animal Studies

This paper is a development of my argument for animal queer and aims to conduct an analysis of some critical animal studies issues in queer terms. In order to do so it pursues queer’s definitional concern with categories through Harvey Sacks’s concept of “category-bound activities.” Connecting CAS, queer and Sacks’s work has the theoretical effect of making queer theory more general, more abstract and more rigorous, and the political effect of extending the scope of queer theory and politics to animal rights issues. The example I explore in the essay— the statement “I could never give up meat”—is of urgent political and theoretical relevance in animal advocacy, and therefore of interest to critical animal studies.